


come on all ye reborn

by crickets



Category: Dollhouse
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-22
Updated: 2010-04-22
Packaged: 2017-10-20 04:06:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/208560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crickets/pseuds/crickets





	come on all ye reborn

There's a period of time when Echo can't feel anything but pissed off. She takes off on her own, leaves the farm behind with a few provisions in her pack and Adelle's warnings in her ear.

She's angry at Paul, at Boyd, at Rossum. _At herself._ No matter how much time goes by she can't shake it, can't stop putting distance between herself, _herselves_ , and the people who have come to believe in her. Some nights on the road she dreams of Priya and the way she looks at her son. After that, Echo won't sleep for days. It's too real, the connection too permanent. Echo seeks the impermanent, feels a desperate pull to become detached.

Echo doesn't think of the scars. [ _Do you trust me?_ ] She doesn't think of the damage done by past misdeeds. [ _With my life_.] She only tells herself that all that time spent jumping from skin to skin was just a bad habit waiting to happen. She tells herself that this is her inevitability.

Yet still, she always comes back. Something about a sense of duty and the knowledge that they aren't quite finished yet, that perhaps they'll never be.

 _Everyone is counting on her_.

They welcome her, feed her, keep her. But it doesn't last. Too soon again she's plotting her escape, as temporary as it may be. And it isn't long until her sojourns cross into Alpha's territory.

She's always known where she was heading.

 _To the one person who understands what it's like to remember everything._

When she gets to his compound he's almost always waiting outside, a cigarette in hand, a bottle of precious clean water in the other. She wants to say it's extrasensory, that he knows she's coming. Logic tells her he's got scouts, logic tells her that of all the people he's been, a psychic was never one of them. But none of that matters when he presses her against the book shelf in his quarters, teeth scraping against her neck.

Echo wraps herself around him and swallows his mouth when they fumble onto the bed. She slides his jeans down his hips. The last time they did this was too long ago and she gasps when he presses inside her. She grips his strong arms; the arms of a soldier, of a father, of a killer, of a brother, of a priest. She moans, urging him on. It's too fast and too rough and both of them come too soon, out of breath and without even remembering to shut the door.

Darkness falls, and Echo lies restlessly, tracing circles over his abdomen. He pushes her hair back from her eyes, asks her the question, the one he asks every time.

 _Do you trust me?_

 _With my life_ , she tells him. And the truth is that she has no choice.

 _And do you trust yourself?_ he asks this time.

Echo closes her eyes.

 _No,_ she says. _Not anymore._

 _-fin_


End file.
